We have been foraging and eating mushrooms for millenniums,and they still have the power to disturb us, to conjure thedeepest human mysteries of sex and death. Nineteenth-centurysensibilities were horrified by the common stinkhorn, a fetidfly-attracting species that bursts out of a membranous egginto a shape perfectly described by its scientific name,Phallus impudicus. In her later years, Charles Darwin’s daughterHenrietta went into the woods to collect stinkhorns for theexpress purpose of bringing them back to be ‘‘burned in thedeepest secrecy of the drawing-room fire, with the door locked;because of the morals of the maids,’’ according to a memoirby her niece. Our continuing pieties about sex are reflectedin the way some modern field guides describe the distinctiveodor of mushrooms like Inocybes as ‘‘unmentionable’’ or‘‘disgusting’’ rather than the more accurate ‘‘spermatic.’’. . .====

Making the woods morally safe -- sounds like a jobfor the Mormon Boy Scouts.